A whole bunch of people, here in New York and worldwide, demonstrated Sat*urday in favor of keeping a genocidal maniac, Saddam Hussein, in power.
They didn't put it that way of course.
They were for "peace" - at least those who weren't protesting globalization, "racism," Mike Bloomberg's budget, George Pataki's budget, the president's pronunciation or Mumia the Cop-Killer's continued incarceration:
"Hey, Hey,
"Ho, Ho;
"All bad things,
"Have got to go!"
Except for Saddam, of course.
He gets a pass, while the demonstrators' placards compared President Bush to Adolf Hitler - and called America a "terrorist state."
Objectively, they were arguing against the liberation of Iraq - while claiming to care about the Iraqi people.
What perfect bad faith.
After all, neither Saddam's documented mass killings of Iraqi civilians nor his continuing brutality against his own people - the dissidents tortured with electric shocks, the children raped in front of their parents - ever provoked rallies like this.
And you didn't see any of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi exiles chanting or banging on drums outside the U.N. building. Because no one in the "peace movement" ever talks about or to the one-sixth of the Iraqi population that lives in exile.
For these people, Iraqis are only real or worth caring about as fantasy victims of an evil America.
This is bigotry, pure and simple.
It's bigotry against America, and it is bigotry against the people of Iraq - who are assumed not to deserve the freedoms that Americans take for granted.
Now, some of these people who demonstrated on Sat*urday may genuinely, if foolishly, believe that nothing is worse than war.
There are in fact many things worse than war: things that the United States has fought against - like slavery and tyranny.
But it's all too telling that none of the demonstrators carried posters calling for Saddam to prevent war. Which he could easily do by obeying each of the 17 U.N. resolutions aimed at his despicable regime, disarming and going into exile.
And if there were to be no war - if the Bush and Blair administrations should back down, and Saddam's newly strengthened regime should stay in power for another 10 or 20, years - then the "not in our name" crowd will have the blood of his future victims on their hands.
Not to mention the victims of the rogue states and brutal dictatorships that will be encouraged by his victory, or the victims of terrorists armed with Iraqi-supplied weapons of mass destruction.
What the demonstrators should have had on their banners were the things they were really calling for:
* No interference with Saddam's torture chambers!
* Let Saddam have the weapons he wants!
* Death to Israel!
* Crush the Kurds! Slaughter the Iraqi Shiites!
* Poison gas, deadly germs and nuclear weapons for terrorist groups!
